The Bible as early postmodern fiction

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good link. good point, too. it's like the people who wrote the bible were as bad as the people who write hollywood movies. ...just rewriting old stories with better effects....


speaking of noah's ark.....

Even if the Lebanese craftsman thought that, it would be irrelevant to the issues regarding the Sumerian Ark in contrast to the Genesis Ark.

I am constantly amazed that people take this book seriously. It is mostly a collection of myths taken from other traditions dating back to the stone age.

Yet people will seriously discuss how Noah got kangaroos on the ark or how the Red Sea parted or how the sun stood still.

If I were to get up and ask "What did Oden mean when he did this?" or "Why did the gods of Olympus fight about this?'" then the Christians would look at me as if I were demented.

They want "creationism" taught in schools. Ok, but whose creationism? Why not the creation stories of the Navajo Indians or the Australian Aborigines or the Hindus or Zulus?

It must be true because it is in the Bible!
How do you know the Bible is true?
Because it is the word of God!
How do you know it is the word of God?
Because it says so in the Bible!

Not only do people take nonsense religions seriously but to this day they are more than happy to kill "unbelievers" in huge numbers just to prove their point and because their god wants them to.

Which/what "bizarre obsession" do you mean?

If you mean an overwhelming reliance on/obeissance to/obsession with the model of cause and effect, ( which I believe is represented/referred to by the lists of genealogies ), I don't think that it's all that bizarre, ( if by that you mean abnormal ), because enormous numbers of people nowadays, and most modern/developed societies, have it too. I think that believing in the absolute truth of the model/theory which is "cause and effect", ie. failing to see its "contingency"/partiality, is a recipe for experiencing a god or "one" reality" which feels like the Old Testament god, despotic/tyrannical, oppressive, unpredictable/quixotic, demanding, etc.

If you mean an obsession about family lineages ... I don't think that is what the lists are about; that would be, as you say, redundancy, ( especially if, as is more than likely, they are fake ), and I don't think the bible suffers as much from that as people tend to think. I believe that they are referring to/"using" the respect etc accorded to the traditional family/kin group "accounting process", and the similar structure of that model, ( the similarity being in the nature of a synecdoche actually :lol ), to show the extent of our submission/alliegance to, and our tendency to connect and also separate/categorise things/events etc according to, the model/theory which is "cause and effect". A metaphor, in fact.


I think that what is post-modern about the bible is the conjunction of the New Testament with the Old Testament. The Old Testament on its own is not at all post-modern, ( it is a mixture of virtually every kind of literature that is possible, apart from that, but I don't, offhand, think that it includes postmodernism ), but the New Testament text/narrative, esp the Gospels, placed/es the bible as a whole in the avant/van guard of developing thought; it is, as you say, perhaps the very first post-modernist take on anything ( to make it out of someone's conversation somewhere and on to the bestseller list anyway ). It's not surprising that the narrative/text had such an impact.

Even today the vast majority of people still believe in the absolute truth of certain models, ( especially the scientific ones; eg. that so-called objective models/measurements etc describe the "one" reality ). Even now the idea that all models/theories are contingent is still mostly confined to academic circles, the most progressive political rights movements, advertising agencies, :lol, etc. And this understanding, in the west anyway, is pretty recent, not much more than 40-50 years old. The Gospels were two thousands years ahead of their time! :lol ( or rather it took western society two thousand years to even begin to arrive at similar/identical conclusions ).

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I'd be interested to hear what elements, if any, of the Old Testament you think might be signs of postmodernist thought though, Awesomelyglorious, however embryonic.

My impression is that the most unified and substantial sections of the OT are the writings of one or more people who believed/had total faith in the possibility of describing, grasping, understanding, perceiving, and most of all controlling/manipulating or at least placating/negotiating with god/the "one" reality with the tools of "objectivity", including measurements, obsessive respect for the model of "cause and effect", and by following minutely detailed laws/rules in daily life. ie. They believed, as most people today do, that models could, if just complex enough, "convey/contain/accurately describe" the "one" reality"/god.

Even the story of the Tower of Babel seems to me to be proof of such a belief, by suggesting that humans could have done it with language; that it was destroyed because it *could* have done so.

The book of Job is the most noticeable exception to this philosophy, examining as it does, and railing against, the fundamental absence/lack of humanly discernable rhyme or reason to "god's"/the "one" reality's "behaviour"/treatment of humans.

It may in that sense be a forerunner for the NT postmodernism, in which parable after parable points to the different truths created by different viewpoints, ( eg. the widow's mite; worthless to one, a fortune to another; etc ), the gaps between apparent cause and effect, ( the seeds and the soil they fall on ), and their lack of what we would call "justice" too, ( the workers in the vineyard ), the way measurements fall short of the "one" reality, ( eg. the loaves and fishes ), and the importance of acknowledging/distinguishing between the two, our models and the one" reality, ( eg. the taxes, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's ), etc.

I don't see any such analysis/understanding in the OT. But it is very interesting how the Gospels use the OT itself, as you say, to show that the only absolute Truth "in" a text is in the eye of the observer/believer, unavoidably subjective, ( because even the so-called "objective" is just the "subjective reality" of the largest and most complex human social organism at any given period, as I said on your thread about models/theories, etc ), their interpretation constructed by their genes, upbringing, and ongoing social and physical/chemical environment. And of course, as you pointed out, there are four Gospels, four viewpoints, all subtly different, all "True".

PS. I think I have posted about this before, but it seems to me that Jesus Christ is a metaphor for subjective "truth"/reality/belief.

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Actually I'm wondering about this. It doesn't perhaps go as far as the postmodernist position on things, but it does appear to be the account, in powerful literary form, extended metaphor etc, of someone's experience of having built, or of having seen other people build, a vast and hyper complex "tower"/model which they believed could, and would, describe and contain the "one" reality/god, only to see it brought low, debunked/shattered by ... the "one" reality/god itself ... and as such could be said to express a proto-postmodern understanding of things, ie. that models can never touch/reach the "one" reality.

Where it falls short of postmodernism perhaps is in not making clear that *everything* we know, see, hear, etc is a model, not just our most grandiose "theories of everything".

PS. But I am suddenly reminded of Augustine's "City of God"; he accepted that it was impossible to "get there", to reach or describe or experience, the "one"/ultimate reality, but believed that we could not, or should not, stop trying to. Which dilemma you seemed to be referring to, Awesomelyglorious, in the title of a recent thread of yours, "The Failure of Theory and the Necessity of it".

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The obsession to know the genealogy of fake generations.


Oh, I don't think the issue is causality. If anything, the real issue is essence. Certain people are considered more important than others, as certain bloodlines are considered more important. Just keep in mind the genealogies of Jesus, as both went through certain major figures because those major figures were important.


I can see


Well, ok, I think that the Old Testament involves its own interpretation of other passages, and that this is often such that it can question our own interpretations about events. I also see that the Old Testament can talk about the same issues with different perspectives. Even further, one could argue that the story of Job includes as a sub-plot the quest for explanation and the failure for man ("modernism") to succeed in discovering this as God rejects both Job's friends and the real ability to explain Job's sufferings while still affirming Job's character.

I can see your point about the New Testament though.


I suppose you could say that the Gospels were ahead of their time.

I addressed this in the last comment, by pointing out that Job was relatively postmodern in some sense.


No, there is a sub-plot that God is completely beyond comprehension, and so transcendent that He cannot be engaged. This is very important in Job

Also, the issue with the rules is that a number of them tend to be explained away in Jewish law. Jewish law being an absurd thought process that itself reaches counter-intuitive conclusions enough that it brings questions about the nature of reasoning.


At the same time, while it shows the possibility of doing this with language, it also shows the impossibility as God destroys language to preserve His power, meaning that at the heights of human effort, God will undermine us, still destroying the modernist quest for truth.


Yes, I mentioned that.


Right.


Without a doubt, Jesus represents truth. One could question how subjective he is though, even within the NT.

Yes, that is perhaps a possibility. Certainly the symbolism works to some extent.


Right, well, I didn't say that the Bible was well-written. Certainly a war of towers would be more powerful in this regard.


Right, that makes sense.

The Gospels are ahead of our time. They are pre-scientific. Mostly nonsense.

ruveyn

I suppose you could say that as well.

The author is dead, and all interpreters are valid.

The bible should have had a warning label that said "WARNING! Pure fiction not to be taken literally! Side effects may include: Imaginary Friends, Flawed Logic, and an inflated ego. Contains logical Fallacies"

I would like to quote a scene from the film Contact.

Rachel Constantine: I assume you read the confidential findings report from the investigating committee.
Michael Kitz: I flipped through it.
Rachel Constantine: I was especially interested in the section on Arroway's video unit. The one that recorded the static?
Michael Kitz: Continue.
Rachel Constantine: The fact that it recorded static isn't what interests me.
Michael Kitz: [pauses] Continue.
Rachel Constantine: What interests me is that it recorded approximately eighteen hours of it.
Michael Kitz: [leans forward so he is looking directly in the camera] That is interesting, isn't it?

A fitting illustration of what I find interesting. It is true the Bible could be nothing more than a fictional fable, but I think none of you are looking at what could be the obvious truth. Let's look at the Biblical authors. Virtually all of them were normal people like you and I. With the exception of Jeremiah and King Solomon most were not part of any ruling, elite classes of the day. For example the Scribes and Pharisees during Jesus time. These elite groups mostly had access to biblical scrolls of the day, and in many cases didn't let the public view them. Collectively it took these common men around 1,600 years to finish the Bible. The level of consistency between the various books is amazing. Of course you need to research them yourself. Remember the Bible was written before the advent of computers and printing press. These men didn't have access to the kind of technology we have today that would have made cross referencing easy and possible (aka Wikipedia). On top of all this many of these men had to recount events in great detail several years AFTER the event occurred; a daunting task that most humans would not be capable of performing. Some people believe the Bible is the word of God translated by mere humans. I don't know what to believe but it seems reasonable to me to say that some sort of superhuman force was involved in its creation.

To reiterate Contact: Ellie's radio went silent for approximately 9 seconds recording static during that time, and yet...

Rachel Constantine: The fact that it recorded static isn't what interests me. What interests me is that it recorded approximately eighteen hours of it.

In other words I feel the obvious truth of the Bible is probably staring people right in the face only they're too blind to see it.

I think that fiction/fables/myths are among the greatest conveyors of wisdom/"truth". I don't think that there is anything ( intrinsically ) "minor", trivial or inferior, about myth/fable/fairy tale.

I would say that if, on the contrary, it were "mostly" history, ( so called "objective truth" ), rather than extraordinary fiction/myth/invention, that would make it less significant. ie. if the bible was "nothing more than a historical document", ( any totally incredible events in it simply distortion, or the result of "primitive/naive" beliefs ), it would be of less value/interest.

Edit. PS. Why do you think that a fiction/fable/myth is such a lowly thing? ... Perhaps because there is "not much room at the inn" ( human social organisms which venerate "objective" measurement, numbers, lists like for a census, etc ), for subjective truth.

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Have you ever tried to read the Book of Mormon?

Yes. A pure work of fiction by Joseph Smith of Palmyra N.Y. It is a spoof on the Bible.

ruveyn